Our
firm was established in 1974 by Max Jacobson and Murray Silverstein
who had been colleagues at the Center for Environmental Structure
in Berkeley and were among the authors of A
Pattern Language. Barbara Winslow joined the partnership
in 1981. Since 1995, we collaborated on many projects with the office
of Helen Degenhardt Architect, and our firms merged in 2003.

Over the years, our firm has completed over
400 projects. These projects have been published in several books
and in such magazines as Progressive Architecture, Fine Homebuilding,
Sunset Magazine, Restaurant Design, Custom Home and The Architectural
Review. The partners have written two books, The
Good House (Taunton Press, 1990) which presents a design
theory and uses many examples from the work of the office, and Patterns
of Home: The Ten Essentials of Enduring Design (Taunton
Press, 2002).

Fundamentally our concern is to create buildings
of quality, appropriate to their settings, and satisfying to the
people who inhabit them. We offer the full range of architectural
servicesfrom planning and program development, through design
and construction documents, to on-site inspection. When appropriate,
we act as design architects and form an association with local firms
to complete work that is geographically remote. We work at all scalesfrom
additions and remodeling through complete buildings or building
complexes, to community plans.